Tag Archives: Gender

A novel that can be summarised in a single, captivating sentence is a publisher’s dream. Not that ease of marketing is a reliable measure of excellence. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), for instance – which could be described as ‘the story of a mother who dies before taking her son to visit a lighthouse, and later a woman completes a painting’ – achieved classic status despite an unpropitious précis. Woolf’s genius aside, it is difficult to imagine a sentence like that sparking an international bidding war of the kind that erupted last year over Hannah Kent’s first novel. Burial Rites – ‘the story of the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland’ – reportedly netted Kent a considerable advance.

The Stella Prize, which comes with a whopping $50,000 purse, is Australia’s newest literary prize celebrating Australian women authors. Australia’s other “gendered” prizes for literature include The Kibble Literary Award ($30,000) for a fiction or nonfiction book by an established Australian woman writer; and The Dobbie Literary Award ($5,000) for a first published work by an Australian woman writer. Australian women writers are also eligible to enter Britain’s The Women’s Prize for Fiction (AU$45,000), awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English. It is not impossible that a first book by an Australian woman author could sweep all of these prizes in a literary superfecta amassing a tidy $130,000.

Review of Love: A History by Simon May; and Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality by Gail Dines.

Madame de Staël, famously exiled from Paris by Napoleon for her menacing wit, put her finger on the difference between male and female passion: “The desire of the man is for the woman”, she says, “but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man”. Two-hundred years later, nowhere is de Staël’s remark better illustrated, and enacted in greater numbers, than in Internet pornography which seems to specialize, as far as I can see, in choreographing illimitable contortions of heterosexual sex, all the while managing an adroit distance from every female erogenous zone known and unknown to man. But more on porn shortly.

Review of The Beaver directed by Jodi Foster and a profile of lead actor Mel Gibson

Everybody’s heard that Lord Byron was mad, bad and dangerous to know. But perhaps it’s not so well advertised that Caravaggio killed his opponent after a game of tennis by stabbing him through the femoral artery in a bungled castration attempt. Or that Bernini, on suspecting his mistress was having an affair with his brother, dispatched a bravo to slash her face to ribbons, then pulped his brother himself. Or that Naked Lunch author William Burroughs aimed his handgun at a water tumbler balanced on his wife’s head in a drugged-up game of William Tell and shot her in the face.

Welcome

Bronwyn Lea is the author of four books of poems: Flight Animals; The Wooden Cat and Other Poems; The Other Way Out; and most recently The Deep North: A Selection of Poems published by George Braziller Inc. in 2013. Her poems are widely anthologised, appearing most recently in Thirty Australian Poets, Australian Poetry Since 1788, Sixty Classic Australian Poems, and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry.

As Poetry Editor at the University of Queensland Press her list included award-winning titles by Australia’s most distinguished poets – David Malouf, John Tranter, Laurie Duggan, John Kinsella, and many others.

Bronwyn reviews poetry, fiction and non-fiction for a number of literary pages, and she is a Politics and Society columnist at The Conversation.

She lives in Brisbane and teaches literature and writing at the University of Queensland.